Is it possible to be a software programmer without attending proffessional courses?

I became an excellent web-developer and designer without taking any sort of proffessional courses etc. I learnt it all from online tutorials, and learning from other's work and now I am working as a full-time freelancer for a company and earn quite well.

Now I would like to enter the software development world. I went to Google.com and looked up for various resources, mostly communities etc and places for complete beginners. For example when I was a complete beginner to web-design the one site that really stood out and actually was targetted for complete, zero knowledge beginners was W3Schools.com. I learnt the basics from there and It laid down the paths where I had to travel.

The software community however seems a bit confusing to me. It's too wide and big with so many languages, or "paths" to go on. I need a site similar to W3Schools.com which would be for software development and targetted for complete, zero-knowledge beginners and shall effectively show them the various paths to travel upon and briefly explain what exactly can be achieved by each path so I can carefully choose one to start off.

Thank you very much.
"I have a lust for knowledge, I have a lust for creativity, my pants are always on fire and I love everyone except lazy people."

 

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Can you share some examples of your work?

The hardest part is getting your foot in the door. And you do that by building a good portfolio and skillset. The good news is that the internet is just beginning to mature so the technology you learn now will live long into the future.

I recommend joining an open source project or two.

'Professional courses' won't make a talented person more talented. You need to get out there and learn bits and pieces along the way.

 

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I've been programming since I was 7 yrs old. I have never had any kind of professional training, yet I support a wife and 4 kids on the back of my programming skills.
Start off with some Visual Basic. I am happy to do a W3Schools style tutorial here for you to get you started. Learning Visual Basic will give you a good intro into any programming language.
PM me if you need help finding the appropriate software.

peace

c20

 

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That post was very inspirational to me. I started using computers at the age of six, when I got it as a birthday gift. At the age of 9 I started off with HTML and from there I have achieved a lot, I got my first ever paid job at the age of 11 and now I'm 14 years old and still work and earn enough. I've been obsessed with computers more than anything else, whenever I read about successful people such as Bill Gates etc who had this strong passion and interest from such a young age which continued to get stronger as they aged, I get very inspired and my interest and passion grows even more stronger. I get more determined and I want to do something good for the world by being a computer scientist. Computers have endless possibilities and I believe we are still at the very beginning of exploiting these great possibilities. There's so much more that can be done and I am definately going to take active part in this. Going to to moon would have been a very weird thought until someone actually did it. This is the thought which empowers and inspires me. I want to learn the nuts and bolts of computers. I know and I know, I just know that the computer is one of the greatest inventions of all time and that we can still exploit thousands of more great uses of computers.

Thanks for your kind help c20H25N30, I wish you success and I hope that you will do something good for humanity and mankind by promoting this very great invention - computers. The possiblities are endless. Sky is the limit, keep heading towards it!

I will start off with Visual Basic and then I'll post back here when I am done with it completely. Let's see what's this Visual Basic is about. You just can't believe the excitement in my heart and the feeling of creativity in my fingers going on right now. My fingers are eagerly waiting to hit the keyboard to type my first Visual Basic code and expirment further and further. I had this very same experience when I was starting off with web-development, and I always have this great feeling whenever I am about to do something which I believe is very great and will have good results not only for me but for the progress of mankind. We all should care about the progress of the whole mankind and not only about ourselves, it's because of these great kind selfless scientists and innovators that we get to enjoy the luxuries and the vast easily accessable knowledge etc we hve today. We definately should do something to continue this progress and while doing it enjoy this pleasent experience called "life" ourselfves. We are here for a limited time, so it's best to take full advantage of this short time and achieve whatever we want.

Thank you very much.
"I have a lust for knowledge, I have a lust for creativity, my pants are always on fire and I love everyone except lazy people."

 

i have vb 6.0 learning edition on cd and i cracked it how can i get a replacement? the cd is about 5 or 6 years old.

 

Well, I think you are better off these days with Visual Studio NET which incorporates VB.NET and ASP.NET development environments (as well as other more advanced languages).
PM me and I will let you know of a source. I can also provide a resource for the Visual Studio 6 if the download of 2.5gig for .NET is not appealing

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peace

c20

 

Possible yes... probable in today's job market... not the best chances. Basically the supply of software folks right now far exceeds the demand and hiring managers are looking for:

A) Evidence of strong skill and aptitude.
B) Evidence of strong professional achievement.
C) Evidence of strong education (usually a BS or Masters)

Item A) is usually handled by technical screens, B) is handled by communication with references and / or portfolios, and C) is handled by diploma verification.

A strong A) & B) will negate a missing C); however, the challenge is getting an opportunity to build a strong B) without a C) in the first place. It might make sense to just get a student loan and get a degree (they are really not that hard and it only takes 4 years).

 

Honestly I'm not sure how much 'professional courses' matter to most application developer managers. I know I've never ran into anyone that cared what
'professional courses' I've done, which is 0. Most care about my work background, what I have worked on before, what am I working on now, what types of technologies am I familiar with, etc. Even more so than that they care about my academic background. If you're looking for a job as a code monkey (which is honestly only one step up from a web developer now adays) then thats fine, but if you ever want to move into actual development, planner, user interface studies, QA, etc. The things that turn software from something you made on your computer to something that really makes money, they'll want to know you have the background for it. Too many programmers today are just internet jockies who download code off the web, glue it together and call it software. It ends up running horribly and they have no idea why. They have no idea how to be innovative or how to implement something thats never been done before. I've got my BS in Computer Science and am currently getting my MS and PhD in computer science. And while that little degree comes in handy getting in the door, once you're in they want to know you can apply these things. Companies like Google don't hire code monkeys, they hire engineers. They have more PhDs working for them than just about any company (relatively so, considering the number of employees). The kinds of things Google and companies like it are developing simply haven't been done before and it takes more than just knowing how to program to really do it.

-AntonK

 

It's worth pointing out that anyone working for google or the like will be working as part of a development team.
No one makes individual decisions. There are people who do the business analysis and create the business case for ventures, other people will scope out the project specification and so on right down to the Dev manager who will delegate the task of creating interfaces that code must conform to. Then individual programmers will be delegated the task of creating the business logic objects using defined interfaces, there will be a database team responsible for ensuring efficiencies are met within the database structure. There will be a design team responsible for designing the look and feel of the application, another set of programmers to work on any user interface. Man these things take a huge team effort but you dont have to come up with the whole thing by yourself

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If you are really interested in bringing a solution to market, perhaps you should consider the project manager route. I strongly recommend you get qualified in project management before applying for such a post though

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peace

c20

 

You could start with python. It is free and friendlier than VB.
http://www.python.org/download/

 

I second Python. Give Ruby a look, too.

 

Pascal does not get enough credit. Delphi is just as easy to use as VB but far better IMO.
Try Lazarus (Open Source Delphi 3 clone) and the following tutorials.
Learn Pascal
Pascal for Programming Illiterates

 

i assume by website programming knowledge you know php? if you do, then picking up another language shouldn't be too hard.. the closest thing you can get is c/c++ (personally, i loathe java..).. A bit further away you will see python/perl/ruby (which i recommend if you have programming background).. still further away you will see such languages as lisp family (which i use right now..)

hope that gives you an idea of general areas of language currently been used..

 

I know it seems like I'm just singing the same tune, but if you learn one imperative language you've learned them all. If you understand the concepts of OO, then learning Python, C++, Java, C#, etc is just a matter of reading the details. Try out some other types of programming such as declarative, functional, etc. For declarative, Prolog is still a favorite of mine. Functional.... of course, no contest its Lisp. There languages may not seem like they are valuable in terms of software development, and in most ways, they aren't. What they ARE valuable for is learning to think differently. If you truly give yourself up to using functional programming and declarative programming they way they were meant to be used, you'll find yourself able to look at a lot of problems from a COMPLETELY different perspective. Trust me when I say this can be helpful.

-AntonK

 

Because maybe, you never see Pascal progammng jobs?

I was taught Pascal at Uni. Completely bloody useless in the real world. I've since learned enough perl, html, csh, and vbscript to get by. Most of the programmers I've worked with use C, C++ and Fortran. I've _never_ seen Pascal in the workplace.

 

Personally, I wouldn't ust Visual Basic to save my life. I can't stand it. I haven't been able to start on much latley, but that's because all of the online tutorials I've found are terrible. I'm pretty sure most places have evolved out of Pascal, and I've heard a lot of businesses use Visual Basic, but I pray every day that I don't get screwed with a job like that.

 

I learned Visual Basic as a child, it gave the kind of instant gratification that a young programmer loves. Unfortunately it didn't teach me good programming. Fortunately, you can get the instant gratification of Visual Basic by learning a bit of Visual C# .NET.

C# is basically a slightly modified Java and combined with the easy form layout and visual programming environment its VERY fun to program and VERY nice for rapid application development.

However, there are some caveats. Anything written in Visual Studio, this includes Visual Basic.NET, C# .NET and C++ .NET, is going to be run using a form of byte code and is not natively compiled. This leads to slow code in a lot of cases. If they ever modified it so that you could compile statically linked natively compiled code, I'd never program in anything else

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-AntonK

 

You forgot to mention that you're tied to the windows platform and must pay hefty fees for the software (unless you pirate.)

That same instant gratification + learning can be had with Python, plus it's free, plus it's cross platform. Python isn't slow either (was recently used to write the entire interface and AI of Civilization 4).

That said.. C# is more open and fun than Java. Whatever you do.. do not pick Java.

 

Personally, I'd say that Java is more open(if by that you mean approachable). It has less keywords, less language constructs and is quicker to learn.

 

Dot net code is not slow because of the opcodes. It uses just in time compilation. That means that the code is compiled when you execute it. The reason that some DotNet languages runs slowly is because it uses managed code which will slow down your application. Especially if your constantly creating new objects.

There are interfaces available that give you control of the garbage collection, thus you can control your memory management. Personally I have never bothered to learn this interface. If I need fast code (3D displays) I will write it as a C++ MFC application in the dot net IDE. Its still provides the rapid development environment, but you can force compilation to a number of different processors, don't have the overhead of the greedy garbage collection, and will run on average 20% faster then the equivalent C# or C++ managed application.

For real speed and with a target CPU in mind you can create a Console C++ unmanaged application and uses the __asm keyword to write assemble code in your C/C++ source. The DOTNET C/C++ linker includes an assembler. With DOTNET IDE, and if you're smart you can create the fastest code possible for a given CPU.

So C#, C/C++, VB, JScript, VBScript, ASP and assemble all in the one IDE, all compatible with each other.

DotNET IDE is the best thing since sliced bread.